I love praying for missionaries directly involved in creative and reflective evangelism. Not only do I get the joy of partnering with them in their work... but I get to learn from them and steal all their ideas that they share in the prayer newsletters!These little notes were sent out by Paddy at the end of last year. Bear in mind they are very much sketches of ideas sent out to prayer supporters, not fully-formed articles and arguments, so read them with that in mind. They are reprinted here with permission.You can support Paddy Benn

This week is Week 13 and another year is drawing to a close. It has been a full semester with many EUers meeting to read the Bible, be taught by God, and to work at living lives that bring glory to Jesus. Once again we farewell about 150 students who will graduate at the end of this year. We have also have started preparing for 2018 and the influx of (God­-willing) many who will be interested and committed to joining the SUEU next year.

The end of this year brings me to ten years of serving the students of the SUEU at Sydney Uni campus. I thought it would be a great time to write to you — my supporters — with some reflections on the last ten years, and also to say thank you for your support over this time. My plan is to send out three updates with each one covering a particular aspect of campus ministry and the changes and challenges of the last ten years. One of the key reasons why I was appointed to the role st Sydney Uni was not to be the evangelist but rather to affect the culture of evangelism within the SUEU. Ten years on is not a bad timeframe within which to consider how the culture has changed.

As best as I can conservatively estimate, when I arrived there were about 5–­8 people per year becoming Christians. Now (under God) we see about 30 people per year place their trust in Jesus. And these are just the ones we know of. In the last ten years, we have trained at least 750 students in personal evangelism, and have seen hundreds more investigate the claim of Jesus.

Similarly we started an E­Network which catered particularly for the 10–­15% of EUers who were really keen on evangelism. We have seen nearly 250 people come through this and be specifically trained, encouraged and supported in their passion for evangelism. Likewise we have attempted annual evangelistic activities across the entire SUEU ­ by using a variety of methods and programs, thus giving a well­-rounded experience to EUers during their four years with us. The SUEU is, according to the students, a mission taskforce, that seeks to reach the lost on the campus of Sydney Uni with the gospel of Jesus. The current evangelistic culture is one of biblical, thoughtful and intentional evangelism. A culture where the lost are captivated by the saving message of Jesus, where EUers invite and bring friends to hear the message of the gospel, and where we ask people to commit to following Jesus. Praise God for the way He has worked in the last ten years! I am so thankful to God that He has allowed me to be part of this great team effort over these last ten years. We do not know (humanly speaking) the ongoing and future impact that this input into the lives of these hundreds of students will have. I am overjoyed when I met graduates who point to their time in the SUEU as a formative one for shaping their attitude, convictions and skills in personal evangelism – I suspect and hope that there are hundreds more like them. As you pray for me and the ministry on the campus, could I please ask that you remember the many whom we have trained, and give thanks to God for the wonderful opportunity that we have had? Please also pray that we would continue to train and equip future generations of students for a lifetime of evangelism in their various contexts.

I heard Peter Adam deliver this material about 10 years ago (if not more) at some preacher's workshop or conference. It was a great articulation about how to make sure our preaching is more than just an analytical commentary of the concepts in the text. Boring and dispassionate preaching is not just lacking in extra-biblical methodology and technique... it is also sub-biblical, in the sense that it is not asking certain questions of the text itself. So then, here are Peter Adam's '8 Useful Questions'

What result does God want from speaking this text? What is the text trying to DO?

What lessons can I learn from the various contexts of this text?

What is the structure of the text and how can I communicate it?

What are the main points of the text and how can I communicate them?

What are the emotions of the text and how can I communicate them?

What are the motivations of the text and how can I communicate them?

What are the illustrations in the text and how can I communicate them?

If you are a Christian with a pulse in today’s world then you will almost certainly feel the pull of competing responsibilities. God, ministry, family, work and leisure all place claims upon us that can easily leave us with feelings of frustration and failure. There is no shortage of books addressing this near-universal condition of modern life, but few of them can match the combination of biblical wisdom, practical roadworthiness and suspicion of easy answers that we find in Mikey Lynch’s The Good Life in the Last Days: Making Choices When the Time is Short.

Lynch provides a valuable service by showing us the inadequacy of many of our current models for coping with multiple demands. Surely the answer is to erect a hierarchy of obligation with God first, spouse second, work third, isn’t it? Not so, argues Lynch. Such a neat schema fails the test of real-life complexity. Let’s try another one. If we feel beset with competing duties, then perhaps we simply fail to realise that they are united in the one overarching obligation to love and obey God. To be sure, Lynch agrees, God’s demand on us not simply one among others, and in all our duties we are serving God. But that neat theological move does not solve all our Monday morning questions or tell us how to respond to the latest email. How about this one: If we really believed the gospel, surely we would spend all our lives evangelising, wouldn’t we? Lynch takes this idea and other like it—ideas that circulate widely in evangelical circles and that hold a prima facie common-sense plausibility—and holds them up to the light of the Bible, unfolding a response that begins with the disarmingly circumspect but insightful observation that “God's Word does not quite put it that way”.

This book’s persistent suspicion of evangelical commonplaces is a helpful corrective for thinking Christians, but The Good Life in the Last Days is not just about questioning received wisdom. In the final three chapters Lynch offers his own biblical, practical advice for ordering our lives, following the eminently memorisable schema of understanding who we are, when we are and where we are.

Lynch’s approach is not only biblical but also well-read. According a clear priority to the direct witness of Scripture he also draws deeply from the well of Christian tradition, always wearing his erudition with a welcome lightness. Readers will encounter a broad range of theologians and writers, from contemporaries such as Christopher Ash, Oliver O’Donovan, John Piper and Stanley Hauerwas, through Lewis and Chesterton to Augustine, Aquinas and John Calvin. The book is not short on popular cultural references either, drawing on films such as The Martian and La La Land. As he weaves in and out of these different references, Lynch brings his own distinctive note of reflective, biblical balance, careful to weigh alternative views before arriving at his own conclusion and mindful not to let any single biblical truth detach itself from the context of the whole of Scripture. This exemplary mode of argument situates Lynch in that great tradition of evangelical thinking epitomised in the writing of John Stott.

Lynch’s own experience as an AFES staff-worker ensures that his writing is never far from the coalface of day-to-day ministry, and it is evident on every page that the author of this book is not a “desk theologian” but a “field theologian”. The Good Life in the Last Days is full of wisdom for ministers and lay Christians alike.